Black women were among the first to publicly protest the crime of racially
motivated lynching in the late nineteenth century. (See the first
section of the document project, "How Did Black and White Southern Women
Campaign to End Lynching, 1890-1942?" also on this website.) In the early
1920s, as experienced activists they took part in the campaign in support
of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill sponsored by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, named
after its author Congressman Leonidas Dyer, was the first anti-lynching bill
to be voted upon by the Senate, despite many earlier attempts by anti-lynching
groups.

An
important part of black women's contribution to the NAACP campaign for the
Dyer Bill was the establishment of an organization that publicized the horrors
of lynching and provided a focus for campaign fundraising. The Anti-Lynching
Crusaders, founded in 1922 under the aegis of the NAACP, was a women's organization
that aimed to raise money to promote the passage of the Dyer Bill and for
the prevention of lynching in general. The Crusaders sought to include white
women but were largely unsuccessful despite the efforts of their director,
Mary Talbert, who sent 1,850 letters to "white women known to be sympathetic
to social reform." The Crusaders' slogan was, "A Million Women United to Stop
Lynching" and their aim was to get one million women to donate "at least"
one dollar each toward the NAACP anti-lynching campaign. As historians Gerda
Lerner and Jacqueline Dowd Hall have emphasized, the Anti-Lynching Crusaders
never achieved their fundraising or legislative objectives but did successfully
publicize the issue of lynching and continue a tradition of campaigning begun
by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the 1890s and later taken up by white women in
the 1930s through Jessie Daniel Ames's Association of Southern Women for the
Prevention of Lynching.[1]

The American Civil War and the
period of Reconstruction that followed redefined the racial structures and
sentiments of the South. The emancipation of black slaves motivated Southern
whites to search for new systems of racial and economic control. By the 1890s,
Southern whites had passed Jim Crow laws--segregation laws intended to isolate
and intimidate blacks. After 1890, lynching, which had existed since colonial
times, became a particularly widespread method by which whites sought to control
blacks. Lynching was the practice of citizens taking the law into their own
hands to end the lives of other citizens who stepped outside of social norms.[2]
Lynching has been described "as a systematic weapon of terror against African
Americans, white and black Republicans, and anyone who challenged the construction
of a new, white supremacist, southern regime."[3]
From 1880 to 1930 approximately 723 whites and nearly 5,000 blacks were lynched.
Lynching peaked in 1892 with 155 black and 71 white victims. Most lynchings
in the South were of blacks, and in the North, whites.[4]
White officials, who dominated Southern governments after federal troops left
in 1877, did not extend legal protections commonly available to whites to
African Americans. In response, African Americans and whites formed civil
rights organizations to fight against discrimination, prejudice, and the denial
of basic civil protections to African Americans. By the 1920s legislative
reform had become one of the weapons in the arsenal of anti-lynching activists
and several Southern states had anti-lynching legislation as part of their
constitutions. These laws, however, were not well enforced.[5]

First introduced into the House
of Representatives in 1918, Congressman Leonidas Dyer's anti-lynching bill
was intended to punish state, county, and local authorities who failed to
prevent lynching and act as a deterrent to end the practice altogether (see
Document 1). In a report he wrote in support of his
bill, Dyer described why anti-lynching legislation was crucial to the cause
of anti-lynching campaigners:

The people of the United States suffer justly under the grievous
charge that they continue to tolerate mob murder. It is well known that the
innocent, equally with the guilty, suffer the cruel inflictions of mob violence.
Mobs have even invaded court rooms and prisons to seize and murder prisoners
whose punishment had already been fixed. Local and State authorities frequently
offer only the feeblest objection to the actions of the mob which is permitted
to do its will unchecked. Rarely are the members of a mob sought out and prosecuted
even when, undisguised and in full daylight, they have participated in murder,
and only in a few isolated cases has any lyncher ever been punished. Patriotic
citizens throughout he country feel the shame which lynchings cast upon the
Nation. . . . We can no longer permit open contempt of the courts and
lawful procedure. We can no longer endure the burning of human beings in public
in the presence of women and children. . . .[6]

The NAACP quickly took up the cause
of the Dyer Bill, publicly expressing support for the Bill at the National
Conference on Lynching held in May 1919 at Carnegie Hall, New York. The NAACP
was a primary sponsor of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill and Mary Talbert was
the most prominent black woman behind the NAACP support for the Bill (see
Documents 2 and 3).[7]
The NAACP began its campaign against lynching in 1909 and promoted federal
anti-lynching legislation for the following four decades, largely without
success.[8] The Dyer Bill
represents one of the NAACP's most vocal, and as James Weldon Johnson argued
in 1923, most successful attempts to publicize nationwide the barbarity of
lynching (see Document 23).

From
the inception of the NAACP campaign for anti-lynching legislation, women were
important figures in the movement. Even before the founding of the Anti-Lynching
Crusaders in 1922, women involved in the NAACP anti-lynching cause were significant
as both donors and fundraisers (see documents 2 and
4). Women recognized their important role as fundraisers,
a task crucial to the success of the anti-lynching cause of the NAACP, and
this activity became the central objective of the women who formed the Anti-Lynching
Crusaders in 1922. The founders of this organization recognized a need for
the NAACP to have a group dedicated to fundraising and saw themselves as the
most suitable means to supply the necessary funds. Mary B. Talbert, then president
of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), headed the new organization.[9]
Sixteen women formed part of the original organization, a number which increased
to 900 over the first three months of activity. Talbert was the National Director,
Miss Mary E. Jackson was the National Organizer, and each state was to have
its own director and "key women." No positions within the organization were
to be paid.[10] The idea for
the Crusaders originated, Mary Talbert believed, with Helen Curtis, one of
the directors of the Crusaders, after Curtis heard a speech by Leonidas Dyer
at the June 1922 annual conference of the NAACP (see Document
14).[11] Black women
from the Club movement and the Young Women's Christian Association became
leaders in the new organization and existing women's clubs around the nation
were targeted for additional membership (see Document 8).
Documents 6, 7, 8
and 9, authored by activists, tell the story of the
establishment of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders as they articulated their cause,
the shape of their organization, and its goals.

The
Anti-Lynching Crusaders had specific aims and its directors hoped to achieve
their goals in a short period of time. The organization came into being mid-1922
and was dissolved on the 1st of January 1923. The Crusaders had a specific
set of goals for the last five months of 1922 (see Documents 11A
and 11B). In a letter Mary Talbert wrote to the
NAACP's State Director in July 1922, Talbert listed the Crusader's objectives:
in August the Crusaders intended to organize their program for the remainder
of the year; in September they were to work on instructing members on campaign
tactics; on the first Sunday in October members were to begin a more active
campaign to which prayer was to be an important part. Talbert hoped "that
over a million women will unite in prayer to God" to end lynching. A special
prayer was to be used by all Crusaders which spoke to the organization's position
on lynching and its hopes for the Dyer anti-lynching bill (see Document
13). With a mixture of prayer, fundraising, political promotion of
the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, and publicity, the Crusaders hoped to achieve
their goals (see also Document 14).

The
Crusaders publicized selected lynchings in order to demonstrate the need for
financial and political support for the Dyer Bill. These stories stress, contrary
to popular myth, that only a sixth of the 3,465 people lynched from 1889 to
1922 were accused of rape (see Document 7).[12]
The injustice of the crime and the horror the victims experienced fueled the
cause of the Crusaders and were powerful components of their publicity flyers.
Documents 7, 12 and 16
describe graphic incidents of lynching and stress that women, typically black
but also white women, were among the victims of lynching. The gender of the
victims and of the black clubwomen who sought to involve themselves in stopping
this crime, may have played an important part in the goals the Crusaders set
for themselves. In the male-dominated world of the NAACP, the all-women Crusaders
initially emphasized that their organization aimed to end the lynching of
colored women in particular. While the Crusaders did in fact raise money for
the wider anti-lynching cause, regardless of the gender of the lynch victims,
early publicity fliers did focus their attack on the lynching of women (see
Documents 7 and 8).

The
Anti-Lynching Crusaders formed a fundraising auxiliary for the NAACP campaign
in support of the Dyer Bill. The NAACP was to give support to the Crusaders
with press guidance and an initial monetary investment (see Document
9) and all money raised by the Crusaders was to be given to the NAACP
before or on the 1st of January 1923. The NAACP was to use the money raised
by the Crusaders for publicity, to put pressure upon Congress and state legislatures,
for investigation of lynchings, and for legal processes necessary to the cause
of the Dyer Bill (see Document 15). The relationship
between the Crusaders and the NAACP, however, did not always go as smoothly
as Mary Talbert might have hoped. A letter dated 21 October 1922 addressed
to Talbert indicated that a request from Talbert for additional funding for
the Crusaders was likely to be declined (see Document
19).

Founded
and led by black women, the Anti-Lynching Crusaders hoped to have both white
and black women contribute funds and sustain the organization.[13]
Gaining white women's support in the movement against lynching was an objective
shared by the black women active in the Anti-Lynching Crusaders with their
forerunners. From Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the 1890s to Charlotte Hawkins Brown
in the first decades of the twentieth century, black women reformers argued
that white women had the power to aid the cause of ending racially motivated
lynching. Brown believed that white women had the power to "control" white
men and thus to protect blacks from violence.[14]
White women spoke publicly against lynching as the example of Juliette V.
Harring indicates (see Document 12), and Mary Talbert
sought to encourage white women to join with their black sisters in aiding
the cause of the Anti-lynching Crusaders. Lynching, Talbert claimed, was a
"terrible blot upon America's civilization" and, contrary to common beliefs,
did not serve to protect white women against rape as too few of those lynched
were accused of this particular crime (see Documents 7
and 12). Furthermore, women as well as men were the
victims of this heinous crime and not all--the Crusaders' literature pointed
out, but did not dwell on--were black. White women were lynched alongside
black, though in significantly smaller numbers (see Documents 6,
7 and 12). Talbert called for
white women to join in this largely black cause, because, she argued, black
women had long been loyal to the causes of white women (see Document
18). At least 2,000 white women offered support to the Crusaders during
the campaign between October and December (see Document
13) and Talbert managed to gain the support of what were described as
"powerful" women's organizations (see Document 19).

In
addition to the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, women worked with the main body of
the NAACP to raise money for the anti-lynching cause (see Documents 17,
21A, and 21B). Women
like Emily W. Osgood and Mary McMurtrie were solicited by the NAACP for large
sums of money in the final months of the 1922 campaign for the Dyer Bill when
fundraising became crucial to keep the campaign going after its initial successes.
Women promoted the cause of the Dyer bill through letter and telegram campaigns
to Congress in support of the Bill. They presented anti-lynching bills before
the legislatures of a number of states in the hope that they would force the
federal government to pass similar legislation. Mrs. Mossell Griffin, Chairman
of the Legislative Department of the National Association of Colored Women's
Clubs, was credited with the passage of an anti-lynching bill modeled on the
Dyer Bill by the legislature in Pennyslvania (see Document
20).

The
Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was not the first or last of its kind. Prior to 1922
numerous legislative measures intended to curb the practice of lynching had
been presented at state and federal levels, but with little real success.
From 1901 to 1920, sixteen anti-lynching bills were presented to the Senate,
but none made it beyond the Committee level. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was
the first to make it to a House vote. The Dyer Bill passed the House of Representatives
on the 26th of January 1922 with a vote of 230-119 and was given a favorable
report by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Unfortunately, the Dyer Anti-Lynching
Bill of 1922 failed to become federal law. Donald Grant that "a combination
of Republican inaction and Southern Democratic action by means of a filibuster
prevented the Senate from voting" on the measure in late 1922. The Bill was
to be re-introduced in the next congressional session in 1923, but no further
action was taken and the tenets of the Bill and NAACP interest in anti-lynching
legislation languished until the 1930s.[15]
Those opposed to the Dyer Bill, and similar measures, successfully drew upon
"the doctrine of 'states rights'" to argue that such bills contravened the
rights of states to resolve issues of "law and order"--a doctrine implicit
in the 1877 compromise between the North and the South.[16]
The Dyer Bill was reintroduced into the Senate on several occasions throughout
the 1920s, but never became law, and during subsequent attempts to have the
bill passed the NAACP provided only minimal support.[17]

Although
the Dyer Bill ultimately failed in 1922 and 1923, its supporters succeeded
in bringing attention to and generating greater condemnation of the crime
of lynching. Mary Talbert handed the NAACP the money raised by the Crusaders
in early January 1923. At this time the Dyer Bill was all but dead. The fund
raised by the Crusaders was preserved by the NAACP and drawn upon in the 1930s
during the NAACP's next major campaign for Federal anti-lynching legislation.[18]
The dedicated women of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders--the clubwomen and individuals
involved in lobbying the government and raising funds for the NAACP campaign--succeeded
in promoting the anti-lynching cause, even if the legislation they supported
failed. These women had a grand vision of uniting one million women in a movement
against lynching--black and white women, Southern and Northern women--an ambitious
campaign that did not succeed, but it did provide an important record of how
black clubwomen sought to shape their world. Significantly, in 1922, the black
women who formed the backbone of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders offered an example
that would inspire white women to form the Association of Southern Women for
the Prevention of Lynching in 1930.[19]